“When Joe Breeze did what thousands of Mill Valley kids had done before him — stood on Miller Avenue across the street from the 2 a.m. Club and stuck out his thumb to hitch a ride — he didn’t know he was changing history.“

Let’s chalk some of this up to a kind of CW Nevius-style local rah-rahing.

So on this map (which isn’t exactly pointing north, oh well) the peaks of Mt Tam are on the lower right, and Pine Mountain is on the left across a chain of lakes, and Cascade Canyon Fire Road (aka “Repack” – you can’t expect Marin Co guv’mint/The Feds to honor that bike-centric name) is in the upper left.

Here’s another map, with Mt Tam way off your screen, down and to the right – knock yourself out.

“The chief reason is that our site began as Chronicle readership began dropping precipitously, particularly among those likely to read Beyond Chron. So our readers had not even heard of the Chronicle pieces we were critiquing.”

So how much of a direct subsidy does the Chronicle get from the City and County to write for the web? Zero, I’m thinking. And yet Beyond Chron gets way fewer viewers per writer even though it’s subsidized.

Do you think the somehow-obscure SFGate website, which to its credit actually allows commenters to comment, needs to struggle over and over and over to get an entry into Wikipedia?

Well, let’s see here – after getting bounced from the Wiki for not being prominent (or whatever) enough, this was yet another shot at getting the Beyond Chron into the Wiki – it’s from a few years back:

“Beyond Chron is an alternative daily news website based out of San Francisco that covers local and national politics and culture. Veteran activist Randy Shaw of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic founded Beyond Chron in April 2004, after local progressive activists expressed increasing frustration about stories that were ignored or distorted by the San Francisco Chronicle. Inspired by the success that blogs like Daily Kos have accomplished at the national level, Beyond Chron aspired to play a similar role at the local level [1].

In July 2008, Beyond Chron was voted “Best Local Website” in the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s annual “Best of the Bay” issue- where it was dubbed “the FUBU of local news sources” [2]. Editor-in-Chief Randy Shaw and Managing Editor Paul Hogarth are frequent guests on radio and television programs, where they provide commentary about the local political scene [3].

Because Beyond Chron is published by a housing non-profit (the Tenderloin Housing Clinic), its local news coverage has a heavy emphasis on rent control and tenants’ rights. In April 2006, Beyond Chron broke the news that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s press secretary, Peter Ragone, had purchased a tenancy-in-common unit in which a protected tenant had been evicted [4]. This may have been a factor as to why the Newsom Administration reversed its position on restrictions for TIC evictions [5].

In recent years, Beyond Chron has increased its coverage of national politics — especially the 2008 presidential campaign. In August 2007 at the Yearly Kos Convention, managing editor Paul Hogarth asked Senator Hillary Clinton a four-part question during her “break-out” session that attracted national media attention [6]. Hogarth’s write-up of the event (“Yearly Kos Has Endangered Hillary’s Nomination”) was rated as a #1 diary on Daily Kos [7] – and he was subsequently invited to go on MSNBC’s Hardball.[8] Well before the traditional media caught on, Hogarth was one of the first to predict that Bill Clinton would become a liability for his wife’s campaign [9].

Using the successful model it has employed against the San Francisco Chronicle, Beyond Chron has in the past few weeks directed its fire towards the New York Times — due to what it perceives as the paper’s anti-Obama bias in its general election coverage. Randy Shaw has started writing a weekly column in Beyond Chron called Beyond Times.

Mmmm. That certainly matches the Party Line. Check out this “Joint Statement from Maggie Williams, Senior Advisor to Senator Clinton and David Axelrod, Senior Strategist to Senator Obama” regarding “THE FACT” of unity states this: